Bear Family Records is doing the Lord’s work. The German reissue label has decided there are no country, rockabilly or soul artists too minor or obscure not to rerelease in lavish packages that include everything from their hits or nearest approximations to their outtakes and in-studio throat-clearings. Not all the artists they reissue are obscure, of course; Bear Family released a 10-CD compilation of Charlie Rich, two multi-disc sets examining different periods of Johnny Cash’s career, and numerous discs of Jerry Lee Lewis. The collections put the artists’ careers in perspectives, and the substantial, often-scholarly liner notes help listeners assimilate the mountain of music the CDs present. All Roots Lead to Rock, a book of selected Bear Family liner notes has recently been released, and as editor Colin Escott says, “Some truly ground-breaking and original investigative journalism has gone into their booklets, and it hasn’t received the acclaim that it should.”
As Escott recognizes in his introduction, the subjects of the compilations mean that Bear Family releases tend to be for completists. It takes a certain level of fan to want to hear an artist’s tentative early efforts or late, desperate attempts to cash in on fads to find one more hit, and those are the people Bear Family collections are designed for. The liner notes for that audience rightly assume a more than casual interest in the artist; the prices of Bear Family albums are high enough that they are rarely impulse purchases. Because the notes are written for that audience though, there’s an emphasis on “who did what” info that might not mean as much to those who don’t yet know why they should care about artists like Freddy Bell and the Bellboys or the Four Lovers. Bill Millar’s essay on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins is appropriately titled “A Fan’s Notes,” and while he mentions encounters with Hawkins that were important to him, he doesn’t suggest a way for readers of All Roots Lead to Rock– as opposed to buyers of the compilation- to understand why Hawkins is so revered by his fans.
This flaw is an editorial one made by Escott who selected some pieces that don’t make as much sense out of their original contexts, but some work magnificently. The profiles of Conway Twitty and Duane Eddy show the music industry in full crank, while the stories of Clyde McPhatter and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ stories are told in their tragic glory. Louis Prima’s story is told by singer Billy Vera, who provides a valuable link to understanding the whole Vegas school of entertainment when he talks about the “gafone,” Sicilian slang for “a loud uncouth male.” Prima, he argues, embodied the gafone’s idea of good time music: “he wants his music loud, comical in a way that is familiar to him, [and] a few off-color wisecracks thrown in here and there in Sicilian, so the squares won’t know what he’s talking about.” This connection not only explains the aesthetic that shaped Prima’s act, but it also explains the famed crude humor of Rat Pack shows and later, Dean Martin’s television shows.
One of All Roots Lead to Rock’s more perverse charms is the way it shows why some marginal artists stayed marginal. In an excellent piece on New Orleans’ Smiley Lewis, Rick Coleman and OffBeat’s Jeff Hannusch point out that Lewis’ songs were hits for Fats Domino, Dave Edmunds and Elvis Presley, but he never reached any of their levels of success because “His records were simply too black.” Similarly, editor Escott’s essay on Clyde McPhatter reveals an artist who never truly understood his gift; he quotes Jerry Wexler as saying, “He wanted to be Perry Como” instead of a rhythm and blues singer. These stories of near misses are cumulatively pretty revealing because they show just how many factors can stop an artist’s progress. Tommy Sands’ story shows how even success can sidetrack a career.
In some cases, the question is not what kept the artist from being bigger, but what got someone like Jonesboro, Arkansas’ Bobby Lee Trammell in the game at all. Trammell, best known for a cover of “It’s All Your Fault” by Memphis’ Panther Burns, had a reputation for out of control performances; according to writer Ian Wallis, Fats Domino took Trammell aside after a show and told him, “You know you’re trouble, don’t you, you don’t know when to stop.” Unfortunately, only his last single- the jabbering “New Dance in France” -hints at his wildness. Before that, his recordings show producers trying unsuccessfully to fit him into hot formulas.
All Roots Lead to Rock succeeds because the cult artists, the also-rans and the never-weres are the real rock ‘n’ roll stories. For every Elvis, there were another hundred southern teenagers with a lot of attitude, small town charisma and just enough talent to win the hearts of girls out of their league at local sock hops, and what happened to these Romeos sounds more like real life than any Beatlesque success story.
In many ways, these figures are also the people who passionately loved rock ‘n’ roll; after all, it’s easy to put up with bus tours and long hours of driving between gigs when you’re getting paid. Doing it for cheeseburger money or less takes commitment and the kind of belief everyone who starts off playing air guitar has.
Unfortunately, reality has the last word in the rock ‘n’ roll stories collected here, and that hints at the small daily tragedies that not only dot musicians’ lives, but our own as well.
